I sat the VCAP5-DCA exam a few weeks ago, and I am happy to report that I received the notification yesterday that I passed. I would like to document my exam experience here to help others that may be preparing to sit this exam. The primary challenge in this exam is time. It is essentially a 4 hour exam, and it is a race against the clock the entire time. The exam is 100% lab. This means that you are remote-connecting to a real environment and you are expected to make the necessary configuration changes to that environment for each task. There are 26 tasks in total, and each task will have multiple steps. Also, the lab environment is consistent throughout the exam. You don’t get a new environment for each task. So make sure you don’t irreparably break something (like the management interfaces), or you may just have to end the exam and re-schedule. It is certainly possible to lock yourself out of the lab, so be careful....